[HN Gopher] Intel Honesty
___________________________________________________________________
Intel Honesty
Author : surprisetalk
Score : 258 points
Date : 2024-09-04 15:15 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (stratechery.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (stratechery.com)
| flerchin wrote:
| Brutal. Intel processors will be the equivalent of government
| cheese. Not what anyone wants, but it's what you get with your
| government dollars.
| brcmthrowaway wrote:
| I never thought of it that way. Are they going the way of
| Raythoen/Boeing?
| wklauss wrote:
| I see the semiconductor industry becoming a bit like the auto
| industry. A geopolitical pawn, heavily dependent on subsidies
| and in turmoil due to market forces (switch to electric in cars
| vs. switch to ARM/RISC in semiconductors)
| KerrAvon wrote:
| To be clear, the outcome we actually need here is a bulwark
| against the possibility of China eventually being the world's
| only producer of leading-edge chips.
| datavirtue wrote:
| They are building a huge fab in Ohio but I don't see Intel as a
| going concern that will be around at the date of completion. I
| fully expect the project to be abandoned.
| davidw wrote:
| The geopolitical bit of all this is the real wild card. No one
| really knows what's going to happen there.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| Yeah, you've got Apple, Nvidia and AMD heavily exposed to that
| geopolitical risk, but seemingly not willing to help lessen it
| by investing in US fabs. Whenever I note this people here and
| elsewhere say "they're smart to be fabless" but somebody's
| gotta run fabs and more fabs need to be run in the US and
| quickly. I realize industrial policy isn't in vogue these days
| but it might be a good idea for the future of US semiconductor
| production to arrange some marriages between some of these
| companies that have a lot of capital and have a lot of need to
| reduce their geopolitical risk. Our brand of capitalism isn't
| great at looking ahead more than a quarter or two.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| Apple is heavily invested in the new TSMC fab in the US east
| of the north end of Phoenix, last i read; not sure how
| arranged that marriage really is, but perhaps tax incentives
| for TSMC facilitated Apple plans to heavily utilize it.
|
| (trying to find linkable articles...like this
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/6/23497417/apple-tsmc-
| phoen...
|
| ) ; p.s. i wonder if only i compulsively balance lisp parens
| moffkalast wrote:
| The geopolitical bit is that TSMC is building local US and EU
| fabs in case of a Taiwan invasion. Once those are up and Intel
| becomes redundant the ad hoc subsidies might just dry up.
| davidw wrote:
| Sure, but "is building" could be very far from "is able to
| smoothly switch production if the main plants and some/many
| of the associated people are war casualties"
| andy_xor_andrew wrote:
| US chip production really needs its SpaceX moment, but it seems
| like it will never happen, and we're left with the crumbling
| empire of Intel.
|
| By "SpaceX moment", I mean a startup entering an impossible
| market, where the barrier to entry is billions of dollars of
| research and manufacturing, a market dominated by industry giants
| from the 60s, and yet still coming out on top somehow.
| cherryteastain wrote:
| The semi spacex moment already happened - it was when TSMC was
| founded
| hangonhn wrote:
| That's such a good insight. It really was the SpaceX moment
| or maybe we can say SpaceX was the TSMC moment of space since
| TSMC came first.
| ac29 wrote:
| 1987?
|
| As near as I can tell there was nothing particularly
| remarkable about TSMC in the 1980s or 1990s.
| kanwisher wrote:
| It was one of the first foundries that focused on external
| ip and not producing its own chips
| newsclues wrote:
| Tesla and SpaceX both took time before they started
| generating positive cashflow.
| ska wrote:
| 20 years for a hardware startup to get really going isn't
| unusual. One of the other reasons VC likes SAAS. Hardware
| startups are cash intensive and slow boils, typically.
| NortySpock wrote:
| Maybe the more generic claim is 'when pure-play foundry
| companies started earning more money than the "integrated
| device manufacturer" companies')
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundry_model
| milesskorpen wrote:
| I think the issue is that TSMC exists, which takes up a lot of
| oxygen and opportunity. Whereas in space, there wasn't a high
| quality opportunity, so SpaceX had a lower hurdle to being the
| best (even though that still wasn't easy!).
| doron wrote:
| Indeed, but downplaying the strategic threat to Taiwan as a
| "short-term" potential impact is not a credible position in
| the long term.
|
| It is prudent, possibly even critical, to have foundries on
| US shores, and the US will have to pay for it.
| cdchn wrote:
| Chip production seems another order of magnitude more expensive
| than space travel, when you look at tens of billions for a fab,
| but also several orders of magnitude more productive.
| nemothekid wrote:
| > _By "SpaceX moment", I mean a startup entering an impossible
| market,_
|
| I think semiconductors is a difficult space for a SpaceX.
| SpaceX was relatively cheap - the company itself only raised 2
| billion dollars, and according to Musk, the cost to develop
| Falcoln Heavy was "only" $500M. I think the "thesis" behind
| SpaceX is moreso that the technology to develop rockets had
| come down massively, but the market had gotten fat and lazy on
| government contracts. The market only seemed impossible because
| everyone just assumed so.
|
| On the other hand ASML's EUV machine costs $300M and that's
| only a small part of what you need build your own Fab and
| barring some massive research breakthrough that isn't coming
| down any time soon.
| reaperman wrote:
| > a market dominated by industry giants from the 60s
|
| The thing is, the SpaceX moment occurred because of a rare
| opportunity where the industry incumbents were insulated from
| any competition or need for innovation for ~30 years. Some
| domestic industries still operate in an environment somewhat
| like this (e.g. the steel industry), but still face modernized
| global competition (albeit whose effects are kept at bay via
| import tariffs reaching as high as 266%).
|
| The semiconductor industry... while there are magnificent
| barriers to entry and not "enough" competition, they have
| absolutely not been wholly insulated from innovation or
| competition. And innovation in fabrication is driven at a very
| rapid pace! So there aren't huge outsized profits to be found
| like there was for SpaceX. And even SpaceX needed to invent
| what was almost an entirely new industry (Starlink) to become
| truly profitable.
|
| And even trying to pull a "SpaceX" on domestic steel
| manufacturing would fall flat because you wouldn't capture the
| global market, and would still be dependent on some
| (potentially much lower) tariffs to compete against the very
| modernized factories in China, which are
| innovative/competitive/efficient, unlike our domestic industry.
|
| SpaceX took advantage of a very rare situation where there
| truly was no competition or innovation anywhere on the planet
| for a very long period. I'm not aware of any other industries
| which are quite as far "behind" today as space launch systems
| were in 2010. But if anyone else is, please mention those
| industries here!
| packetlost wrote:
| US Telecom is not _as_ far behind, but it 's pretty far
| behind. Unfortunately, I think it largely competes with
| cellular networks and Starlink these day.
| highfrequency wrote:
| Nice analysis on competitive dynamics of semiconductor
| industry vs. space industry in the 2000s.
|
| > I'm not aware of any other industries which are quite as
| far "behind" today as space launch systems were in 2010. But
| if anyone else is, please mention those industries here!
|
| Digital payments may be in a similar situation. Visa's 2% fee
| may seem low but from a scale and competitive standpoint it
| is fairly absurd - they are making 80% gross margins on $30b
| of revenue to do what boils down to a few API calls and some
| fraud repayment. I doubt that they need to do much innovation
| to keep that moat either (in contrast to say Apple and their
| 30% cut of App Store revenues - they need to constantly stay
| ahead of Android and Windows).
|
| Curious to hear your take on what other industries at least
| come close to the space dynamics in 2010.
| ska wrote:
| From what i can see as an admitted outsider, payment rails
| are more complicated than they look, and most of the crypto
| partisans arguments to "replace" functionality are a mix of
| 'ignoring that part', or 'we don't want that part anyway' +
| a few API calls.
|
| Problem is, the world consuming these things mostly seems
| _to_ want those parts, and _can 't_ ignore those other
| parts. Which seems to explain relatively low uptake.
| amluto wrote:
| Those rails involve an amazing amount of complexity that
| boils down to the entire system being nonsensical.
|
| Payments are pulled instead of pushed; the underlying
| credit card numbers lack even a semblance of security;
| there is all kinds of mis-design due to the way that
| restaurant tips work; it all started when credit card
| imprints/readers were all assumed to be offline; etc.
| beAbU wrote:
| What do you mean "it all started..." ?
|
| One of my earliest memories is my mum paying for
| groceries using her credit card in the 90/00s, where the
| machine used was completely mechanical/manual. It copied
| the card number (that was embossed on the plastic) by
| literally taking a carbon paper rubbing of the card. The
| system was designed to be offline, because back then
| there was no "online".
| amluto wrote:
| That would be one of the credit card imprinters I
| referenced, which is offline...
|
| I also recall the occasional business _writing down_
| credit card details, in person, with a pen, on a form
| they had for the purpose.
| dvdkon wrote:
| Most Czech banks offer free domestic instant payments,
| and many small businesses who were previously cash-only
| now take them as an option. I heard there's also a SEPA
| equivalent.
|
| If the electronic retail payment industry hadn't already
| been captured by VISA and MasterCard, I could very well
| see something like this, a much cheaper and simpler
| system, being what everybody uses. There's countries
| (India?) where debit/credit card adoption was slow and
| now these simpler solutions have significant market
| share.
| astrange wrote:
| It takes (at least) two people to want to adopt a payment
| system. The reason American customers use credit cards is
| that they like them; they're very safe for customers and
| they have reward points.
|
| You could pay with cash or debit if you wanted to, but
| then you can't chargeback the business.
| mnau wrote:
| Sweeden has a Swish and I am pretty sure many countries
| have very similar free option.
|
| We just need a non-profit integrator to do it
| worldwide... Use credit card as a fallback if everything
| else fails.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| >Visa's 2% fee may seem low but from a scale and
| competitive standpoint it is fairly absurd - they are
| making 80% gross margins on $30b of revenue to do what
| boils down to a few API calls and some fraud repayment.
|
| The banks issuing Visa cards do fraud repayment. Visa gets
| paid for their network, and specifically their network of
| higher income spenders who want to play the rewards game.
| Also, note that Visa does not earn 2% of transaction
| totals. A signification portion of total card processing
| fees goes to the card issuing banks to pay for rewards and
| fraud repayment.
| cvadict wrote:
| > to do what boils down to a few API calls
|
| LOL @ anyone who believes that global financial processing
| is primarily a technical problem vs. the regulatory /
| bureacratic dystopia it actually is.
| nick238 wrote:
| I think rockets are insanely _simple_ compared to silicon. The
| amount of research and development it takes to build _a light
| source_ (hot tin plasma[1]) is extraordinary, and fabs are also
| probably the most complicated manufacturing facilities in the
| world. Tesla struggled mightily with integrating disparate auto
| parts manufacturers some years ago.
|
| SpaceX and Tesla benefited from being helmed by a crazy person
| (in their nascent stages), who pushed to break norms in the
| conventional thinking, either "rockets can't be reused/we must
| spend $10B on a test campaign[2] before any part leaves the
| ground" and "EVs aren't cool". I don't think if Musk could
| design a rocket engine from scratch is relevant, but the
| strategic design patterns of 1) reduce requirements, 2) remove
| unused things, 3) simplify/optimize, 4) accelerate cycle times,
| 5) automate. Those points aren't revolutionary, just a more
| expanded "go fast and break things."
|
| The computers that came out of Silicon Valley in the late
| 70s-into the 80s were a disruption to the old stalwarts like
| IBM. Though for silicon maybe _I 'm_ just trapped in that pre-
| SpaceX thinking.
|
| [1]: https://phys.org/news/2020-05-exceptional-euv-hot-tin-
| plasma...
|
| [2]: https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/cost-of-sls-and-
| orion
| kazen44 wrote:
| > The computers that came out of Silicon Valley in the late
| 70s-into the 80s were a disruption to the old stalwarts like
| IBM. Though for silicon maybe I'm just trapped in that pre-
| SpaceX thinking.
|
| another good example of this is how VLSI in particular
| disrupted the mini-computer/mainframe market and made CPU's
| cheap enough to put them into smaller and far cheaper
| machines. This really shook up the old guys who where used to
| being total system vendors. (IBM, DEC etc). Suddenly, you
| could get a computer for much cheaper compared to the decade
| prior, and by the early to mid nineties you had guys like sun
| eating their lunch completely.
|
| IBM pivoted to being a services company and DEC just
| imploded.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| TSMC has been spending $15 - $50 billion per year for years to
| stay on top.
|
| Estimates are it would take $200 - $300 billion just to catch
| up with them and little to no profitability for a decade while
| burning $10s of billions every year.
|
| I think the federal govt is the only entity that has that kind
| of money.
| amluto wrote:
| Maybe one of the e-beam startups can pull it off. Aside from
| scaling issues, direct electron beam lithography _ought_ to
| outperform optical lithography by many metrics, not to mention
| that there would never be costs associated with mask revisions.
|
| Here's one of them: https://multibeamcorp.com/
|
| I remember touring a little research fab, maybe around 2000,
| that could achieve feature sizes comparable to what TSMC can do
| today. But they were very, very, very slow.
|
| (Fast-moving electrons are easy to make, easy to aim, and have
| teeny tiny wavelengths that entirely sidestep most the issues
| that people have with photons having obnoxiously large
| wavelengths. But electrons have all manner of downsides that
| explain why fabs spend many billions of dollars on optical
| lithography, one of which is that they _repel each other_ ,
| which makes shining a lot of them at a wafer at once quite
| problematic.)
| numpad0 wrote:
| I think lack of focus on US domestic chip capability is semi-
| intentional and is an eventuality. Semiconductor industry, and
| many other manufacturing industries too, seem to flourish at
| very outer edges of the free world.
|
| It could be simple as the free world not wanting manufacturing
| capability at home. It could be wanting only grain farms and
| money printers.
| kazen44 wrote:
| Manufacturing in the west is expensive compared to cheaper
| developing countries.
|
| Also, manufacturing has a massive impact on the environment,
| this includes semiconductor manufacturing. It has politically
| been impopular for a while now.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| > By "SpaceX moment", I mean a startup entering an impossible
| market, where the barrier to entry is billions of dollars of
| research and manufacturing, a market dominated by industry
| giants from the 60s, and yet still coming out on top somehow.
|
| This already happened and the startup was TSMC. Unfortunately
| for the U.S., it's in Taiwan.
| zelias wrote:
| I like the proposed approach of purchase guarantees here.
| Directly injecting cash into Intel just creates a moral hazard
| where they spend the money dealing with organizational inertia
| than innovating in the space. Plus, the government could even
| turn a profit reselling its purchased semiconductors to various
| US companies!
|
| The US ecosystem badly needs a serious Intel competitor --
| because they just ain't it.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| > Plus, the government could even turn a profit reselling its
| purchased semiconductors to various US companies!
|
| No freaking way. How do you think that's feasible, considering
| how fast depreciation goes in semiconductors?
| wmf wrote:
| Pork bellies also go bad but you can make money trading them.
| You don't even take delivery.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| are you suggesting the parent comment should be considering
| derivatives like agricultural product futures?
| wmf wrote:
| Yeah. The government could pre-pay for chips to guarantee
| demand then auction the futures right before the chips
| are manufactured.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| The payments are tied to real milestones like building fabs.
| Intel cannot spend the money on organizational inertia because
| that wouldn't get them the money.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| It doesn't matter how badly they want to sell the chips if
| they don't have the money to build the fabs in the first
| place. That's where Intel is at right now. Building fabs is
| incredibly expensive and they need the money upfront.
| NortySpock wrote:
| You can get a loan against the value of a purchase contract
| if you have a firm purchase contract (i.e. from the
| government) and a convincing plan on how to manufacture to
| that price point...
| scrlk wrote:
| > in the late 2010's Intel got stuck trying to move to 10nm,
| thanks in part to their reluctance to embrace the vastly more
| expensive EUV lithography process
|
| TBH, it's easy to say this with the benefit of hindsight.
| Throughout most of the 2010s, EUV lithography was like the "year
| of the Linux desktop" - i.e., this year will be _the_ year where
| EUV was suitable for high volume manufacturing. I don 't really
| blame Intel for deciding to go with self-aligned quadruple
| patterning for 10 nm, but combining it with cobalt interconnects
| was probably biting off more than they could chew.
|
| FWIW, Intel was funding EUV R&D since 1997:
| https://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/1997/CN0911...
|
| That press release had an interesting prediction:
|
| > Intel projects that the microprocessor of the year 2011 will
| contain one billion transistors, operating at over 10 gigahertz
| and delivering 100,000 MIPS (millions of instructions per
| second).
|
| They weren't that far off in estimating the transistor count and
| MIPS: the i7-2600k released in January 2011 had 1.16 billion
| transistors [0] and delivered 117k MIPS [1] @ 3.4 GHz. The clock
| speed prediction was way off due to the failure of Dennard
| scaling in the early-mid 00s.
|
| [0] https://www.anandtech.com/show/14043/upgrading-from-an-
| intel...
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_per_second#CPU_re...
| hangonhn wrote:
| In addition, SMIC in China managed to get to 7 nm without the
| use of EUV. Also early EUV yields were actually quite low.
| schmidtleonard wrote:
| Did SMIC get 7nm to yield or is it limping but propped up for
| PR purposes like Intel 7?
| enraged_camel wrote:
| The latter. China isn't even close to achieving high-yield
| 7nm.
| hangonhn wrote:
| It's in volume production. This is what Huawei uses for its
| Mate 60 phones. They've sold 30 million units. From
| articles I've read the features on the chip are actually
| quite precise, which lead people to think the yield is at
| least decent.
|
| How they will get to 3nm is another question but back when
| Intel made its decision, 7nm was on the horizon so choosing
| to not go the EUV route is not as dumb as it may look now.
| api wrote:
| > Throughout most of the 2010s, EUV lithography was like the
| "year of the Linux desktop" - i.e., this year will be the year
| where EUV was suitable for high volume manufacturing.
|
| We need to learn to recognize the difference between something
| that's never going to happen for either physical or
| economic/social/structural reasons, and something that is just
| really difficult and takes a long time.
|
| I always think of this when I think about fusion and the
| irritating "fusion is 20 years away and always will be" meme.
| In reality fusion has been edging closer, and closer, and
| closer for decades. Like EUV lithography it's just incredibly
| hard and requires a ton of capital and time and some of the
| smartest people on Earth to make it a reality. The same logic
| applies to things like a working HIV vaccine, life extension,
| or human space flight and space settlement.
|
| The reason there's never been a year of the Linux desktop on
| the other hand has to do with the full picture of what's
| required to _mass market_ a desktop OS and support that, not
| just the technical problems, as well as business reasons around
| what Microsoft does to incentivize vendors to stay in their
| ecosystem. Linux desktops are just about ready today but no
| mainstream laptop /desktop PC vendor is going to sell them for
| a long laundry-list of non-technical or para-technical (legacy
| software base) reasons.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I'd say Linux desktops have been good enough for a long time,
| but never broke into the mainstream for the reasons you cite.
| ChromeOS is the closest thing I guess, but outside of schools
| and a few other institutional uses, Chromebooks are not very
| popular.
| davidw wrote:
| They're pretty incredible machines for the price. I bought
| one a year and a half ago in an emergency, as the
| networking on my laptop died over the course of a few days
| and I needed _something_ for browsing and email. I got the
| Linux dev environment set up on the Chromebook and I
| actually kept it instead of getting a new expensive laptop.
| ghaff wrote:
| They are. The problem is that they _are_ for the
| educational market. Especially with Google 's exit from
| hardware, they're basically mostly cheap devices for
| kids. And, if you do build a nice one, you could probably
| get a lower-end MacBook Air for about the same price
| which would be almost as low-maintenance to use if you
| wanted it to be.
| ajross wrote:
| The cheapest Air is $999 for a fast but pretty limited 8G
| device. That budget gets you a 16G Meteor Lake Chromebook
| which runs Debian cleanly in a VM. It's true that Apple
| is doing a better job than it used to in serving the
| budget market, but Macs remain pretty exclusive.
| Similarly a low end Windows laptop with WSL is a better
| budget choice, though IMHO very inferior to the
| Chromebook in Linux integration.
| ghaff wrote:
| I'm not sure we're really disagreeing.
|
| The thing is that I don't really _want_ a budget
| Chromebook (which certainly exist).
|
| I want something for travel mostly. Ended up getting a
| new iPad Air recently which isn't all that light but
| probably fits my needs best as it now has a pretty
| functional keyboard and can easily be used without the
| keyboard as an entertainment/consumption device.
| ajross wrote:
| Context upthread was for a development box, though. Airs
| are pretty limited for that, but the bigger Chromebooks
| do great.
| ho_schi wrote:
| Linux is not preinstalled. There are some ThinkPads* and
| Dells with Ubuntu or Fedora but you need to _know_ that.
|
| And people how know will and must reinstall anyway Arch,
| Gentoo, Suse, Debian, Fedora or Ubuntu.
|
| The Steamdeck is an excellent proof how a full featured
| Linux (SteamOS is based upon Arch) is shipped well. Not a
| unmaintained or googlyified closed-source derivate of Linux
| (Android and ChromeOS).
|
| * I ordered an X13 Gen1 AMD with Linux for fun. Worked
| well, installation was clean. No 120$ for Microsoft and its
| stock owners. You shall not feed the bad guys. Especially
| when you will never use Windows.
| bee_rider wrote:
| The main reason there will never be a "year of Linux on the
| desktop" is that desktops became irrelevant before Microsoft
| became... whatever it is now.
| Maken wrote:
| Another ad company?
| bee_rider wrote:
| Yeah.
|
| But like, also an ad company with no QA? Like Google is
| somewhat evil I think, but they are intensely competent
| in a way that Microsoft is not.
| jyrkesh wrote:
| Microsoft is now largely a public cloud company, also
| supporting a very healthy suite of B2B productivity
| tools.
|
| Which makes the B2C ad stuff they shove into Windows all
| the more infuriating: it's a drop in the bucket relative
| to their other product verticals.
| kbolino wrote:
| I think it's because Windows _as a line of business_ is
| still expected to turn some kind of a profit, even though
| operating systems are not profit centers anymore and
| haven 't been for some time. Whereas, Apple and Google
| view their operating systems as just necessary
| infrastructure to support profitable ventures.
| api wrote:
| Desktops are irrelevant? Other than a few things does any
| actual work happen on mobile devices?
|
| I think it would be correct to say that present-day
| desktops are mature and stable and aren't rapidly changing
| because they fill a mature niche. Mobile does seem to have
| decimated the casual computing and much of the non-work-
| related computing niche, at least for non-technical people.
|
| I wonder if there's an argument to be made that desktops
| should become _more_ technical and power user oriented
| since that is now their niche.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I think "year of Linux in the desktop" has always been
| understood to be in the context of consumer devices.
| Otherwise, I mean, it's always been year of Unix on the
| workstation/server, right? With room to quibble in the
| prosumer space.
| maratc wrote:
| > Other than a few things does any actual work happen on
| mobile devices?
|
| Outside of browsers, not much work happens on desktops
| either...
| robotnikman wrote:
| The huge amount of people still in office cubicles typing
| on spreadsheets all day would disagree
| timschmidt wrote:
| Valve sells the SteamDeck and is preparing SteamOS for use on
| similar handhelds available now from most major vendors.
|
| They may not be traditional laptops or desktops, but they're
| PCs, and they're being sold with compatibility with a large
| installed base of Windows games in mind. Moreover, handheld
| gaming PC users seem to perceive SteamOS as being superior to
| Windows in this device category.
| x0x0 wrote:
| > a working HIV vaccine
|
| It's worth pointing out we kind of have this now. Or, to your
| point, are definitely inching (a lot) closer. The lenacapavir
| trial results are great. From the press release
| https://www.gilead.com/news-and-press/press-room/press-
| relea...
|
| > _Gilead's Twice-Yearly Lenacapavir Demonstrated 100%
| Efficacy and Superiority to Daily Truvada(r) for HIV
| Prevention_
|
| > _- First Phase 3 HIV Prevention Trial Ever to Show Zero
| Infections_
| zhobbs wrote:
| It's a good point, but one thing to consider is that ultra
| long hard tech might be structurally challenging as well. If
| fusion requires 100 years of capital and R&D it won't be
| viable ever due to economic/societal/structural reasons.
| ghaff wrote:
| Intel was also being at least a bit disingenuous in public at
| the time although they probably also thought they could make
| those frequencies work. But a very senior Intel exec told me,
| at the time IBM was showering them with a lot of public snark,
| that _of course_ they new about the upcoming issues but
| Microsoft was so worried about multicore scalability that Intel
| had to play along.
| wmf wrote:
| Nobody used EUV for 10 nm though. Even 7 nm doesn't need EUV.
| This kind of error calls the rest into question.
| encom wrote:
| >year of the Linux desktop
|
| A tangent, and I realise this phrase is a meme, but it has
| always bothered me. Nobody has ever defined _what_ year of the
| Linux desktop _actually_ means, so it 's a phrase without any
| real meaning.
| fluoridation wrote:
| Roughly speaking, that running Linux as a desktop OS would be
| easy enough that even non-technical users would be able to do
| it with difficulties comparable to, say, Windows XP.
| flo123456 wrote:
| Whichever for me was in 2010 when I set up Ubuntu for my
| grandma and put a Firefox shortcut on her desktop and she
| never had any issues with her computer again. Very simple
| use-case but it was a lot better served than by Windows
| Vista at the time. These days it's even better served by an
| iPad though.
| fluoridation wrote:
| IME, that works as long as the user does nothing but
| browse the web and nothing in the environment or the
| computer changes. Things get tricky the moment any of
| those assumptions are invalidated. And that's because the
| user is not really operating the computer, but just using
| it to access the web. That it's a "desktop" is only an
| implementation detail.
| mjevans wrote:
| The goal posts always seem to move.
|
| Windows is an ugly pain in the butt to create install media
| for (when you're not on the native OS), and it's just as
| bad to Install on random hardware. Maybe more so since it's
| less likely to ship network drivers for random wifi gear
| and lan connections. Even Debian has non-free blobs for
| drivers with the (at least 'Live' versions) these days,
| finally.
|
| Repair shops are the next big thing I hear. The goal posts
| always move if it isn't exactly what someone already knows.
| fluoridation wrote:
| >Windows is an ugly pain in the butt to create install
| media for (when you're not on the native OS)
|
| That sounds like a Linux problem, not a Windows problem.
| Windows can create Linux boot USBs just fine.
|
| >Maybe more so since it's less likely to ship network
| drivers for random wifi gear and lan connections.
|
| Eh. IME the opposite is true. I've never seen Windows not
| recognize a network card, but I've on occasion had to
| manually install drivers for Debian for a plug-in NIC,
| but that years ago, now. On the other hand, _very_
| occasionally Windows needs to be spoon-fed drivers for a
| storage controller during installation.
| mrsilencedogood wrote:
| So did the year of the EUV lithography happen? What year was
| it?
|
| (Genuinely asking, I don't know anything about chips - I'm the
| kind of programmer who is profoundly comforted by pretending
| like my CPU is like a really fast version of the thing I did in
| CompE 201, as opposed to reality which i gather is a bit more
| like a demonically possessed stone that glues together a bunch
| of barely understood physics that kind of "even out" at macro
| levels but seem pretty f'd up at quantum levels).
| scrlk wrote:
| 2019, when TSMC N7+ entered high volume manufacturing.
| SSLy wrote:
| OK, and in Intel's fabs? They're still not on EUV, right?
| scrlk wrote:
| Intel 4 was their first EUV process, which entered HVM in
| September 2023.
| baoluofu wrote:
| Your description of reality made me chuckle. I remember
| during my degree the professor teaching us about how simple
| CPUs are made, but saying that the people who engineer the
| current hardware are like dark magicians. It can only have
| gotten more complicated since then.
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| Intel is trapped. Its debt repayments alone are massive. The poor
| performance in stock has encouraged 20years of wage stagnation to
| the point where you can literally earn over 50% more at amd or
| nvidia or even an startup for equivalent roles so they aren't
| hiring the best. Their pay in the Bay Area is double tsmc in
| taiwan for equivalent roles in raw dollar terms but the ppp
| differences means your better off working for tsmc in Taiwan than
| intel in the Bay Area. That's not a joke. Intel are literally
| incapable of attracting talent from Taiwan right now.
|
| They don't have the talent they need and the debt trap and poor
| performance means a lot of push back to the needed doubling of
| wages to attract that talent. It's a very hard sell for any exec
| trying to correct this problem. They sidelined lip bu tan who was
| one of the advocates for even more layoffs and wage freezes but
| he's one of many backwards thinkers they need to remove. It's
| going to be difficult to fix their board.
|
| Without talent intel has no hope of winning and they can't get
| that talent due to poor stock performance for the past 20years
| leading to executives and shareholders wishing to implement the
| opposite of what they need right now. In fact they have ongoing
| layoffs right now. A true downward spiral and the only real hope
| is for a newcomer to step up.
| nightski wrote:
| I'm not saying you are wrong but personally I'd view the stock
| as an attractive perk right now since it is so low.
|
| Whereas if I were joining a company such as Nvidia I'd honestly
| be kind of worried.
|
| Historical performance isn't really a great indicator here.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| sotck can be low because it's undervalued by the entire
| market and going to jump once they catch up to the future
| value potential, or it can be low because it accurately
| reflects the decline and limited value. If you only see the
| "attractive perk" from being so low you're the one using
| historical performance as the indicator, thinking Intel's
| only a few quarters or years away from former glory days.
| sodality2 wrote:
| Efficient market hypothesis dictates the price accurately
| reflects valuations. So if a stock price is down
| relatively, it's because the wealth of information
| available on it indicates its decline.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| I too, used to be a dyed in the wool boglehead that
| believed in efficient markets. The missing small cap
| value / international premium over the past _twenty
| years_ has me convinced otherwise today.
| sodality2 wrote:
| You raise a valid objection: To put the
| US equity outperformance of the last 15 years in
| perspective, US equities historically have outperformed
| non-US equities by 2.3 percentage points annualized since
| 1926 and by 2.7 percentage points in the post-WWII
| period. In our strategic asset allocation models for
| clients, we assume one percentage point of outperformance
| annualized [0]
|
| Not sure this really breaks the idea of small cap vs
| large cap (since there's been swings and reversals in
| that in just the past 15 years IIRC), just the
| international equity differences.
|
| Also, just going to note that 20 years is really not that
| long and it's reasonable for valuation swings to take
| that long to reverse.
|
| [0]:
| https://privatewealth.goldmansachs.com/outlook/2024-isg-
| outl...
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| You can trade your stock for intel stock when working at any
| company. Stock grants really should be swapped for income and
| reinvested how you see best. So ultimately the total take
| home income is what should matter for any new hire. Take the
| higher paying and job and buy intel stock if you believe
| it'll rise.
| tedivm wrote:
| Most stock vests over time though. I can't trade it
| immediately, and the value may drop between when I get the
| grant and when I can actually sell the shares.
| andreasmetsala wrote:
| He's saying ignore the potentially worthless options and
| invest that extra 50% salary you earn at elsewhere in
| Intel stock instead of working there.
| packetlost wrote:
| I mean, I have a lot more confidence that nvidia will
| continue to deliver products to a market that wants to pay
| for them over Intel at this point in time, even if the stock
| is likely to come crashing back down to earth soon. As an
| employee, I wouldn't really factor in stock performance
| necessarily, but the overall image and outwardly visible
| struggles Intel is going through tells me the internal
| struggles are probably far worse than the public or
| shareholders know.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| By what metric do you consider INTC to be low? I took a look
| because I'd be happy picking up some cheap INTC, but it still
| looks expensive to me.
| phonon wrote:
| It's trading significantly below book? $120 B vs $82 B.
|
| Downside is that most of their assets are their fabs...
| ohcmon wrote:
| You would be surprised, but nvidia's employee stock plans
| allow to select the purchase price within the last 2 years
| https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/benefits/money/espp/
| happyopossum wrote:
| ESPP is completely different from stock-based compensation.
| _chris_ wrote:
| > _allow to select the purchase price within the last 2
| years_
|
| I don't think that's true. My reading of that is "you lock
| in the price on your start date and can keep that for the
| next 2 years going forward". That doesn't help anybody
| joining at >$1k / share. :D (and that's only ESPP, not
| standard stock compensation).
| bluecalm wrote:
| Intel stock is as high as it was 15 years ago when they had
| total market domination. Now they are at the brink of
| collapse. The market is way bigger today but still, I would
| take a dominant player over a failing one every day.
|
| Another way to look at it: Intel market cap is 83B, AMD's
| market cap is 228B. Do you think Intel is expected to make
| 1/3 of the money AMD is going to make in coming decades? I
| see no reason to be as optimistic.
| eric-hu wrote:
| > Another way to look at it: Intel market cap is 83B, AMD's
| market cap is 228B. Do you think Intel is expected to make
| 1/3 of the money AMD is going to make in coming decades? I
| see no reason to be as optimistic.
|
| Nit: market cap is not earnings. That's stock price *
| shares outstanding.
|
| This year's earnings looks like this:
|
| Intel, 3 months ended: Jun 29, 2024
|
| > Net income (loss) (1,654)
|
| https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-
| releases/detail/1704/...
|
| AMD, 3 months ended: June 29, 2024
|
| > Net income (loss) $ 265
|
| https://ir.amd.com/news-events/press-
| releases/detail/1209/am...
|
| So Intel lost 1654M and AMD earned 265M. This only makes
| your point stronger.
| dv_dt wrote:
| I think this contains mostly correct analysis with respect to
| hiring experienced talent, but under emphasizes how unique each
| process is per company. Experience is a positive, but less
| positive because of it.
|
| There is a lot of potential that could be made from newer hires
| combined with focused in house training/experimentation - which
| is what all these businesses had to do in their initial
| expansion - with not enough people of experience at scale
| available, and they probably had to do a running training ramp
| up multiple times over multiple generations of growth. This is
| in general is an underutilized strategy - esp for mature
| companies that need to essentially build a new generation of
| tech in-house.
| closeparen wrote:
| >Their pay in the Bay Area is double tsmc in taiwan for
| equivalent roles in raw dollar terms but the ppp differences
| means your better off working for tsmc in Taiwan than intel in
| the Bay Area. That's not a joke. Intel are literally incapable
| of attracting talent from Taiwan right now.
|
| There's some whiplash in hearing constantly how the US is a
| corporate-dominated oligarchy, and then also seeing trillion-
| dollar industries at the forefront of the global economy
| constantly getting their shit rocked by a few dozen NIMBY
| retirees at city council meetings.
| amluto wrote:
| Some of the issues are way downstream of those NIMBYs:
|
| Non-housing costs are quite low in Taiwan. Food and
| childcare, in particular, are so much cheaper than California
| that it's hard to believe.
|
| But the NIMBYs aren't totally in the clear. Rental housing
| with 3+ bedrooms (for families) is severely lacking in much
| of the US. Maybe fire codes are to blame. Taiwan is _full_ of
| very nice new high-rise development that contains units with
| lots of bedrooms. Wandering around those developments and the
| new 3-story developments in California, the ones in Taiwan
| are much, much, much nicer, even from the outside. The NIMBYs
| should take note.
| closeparen wrote:
| While there are a number of technical issues with respect
| to the limited trickle of multifamily permits that are
| given, the fundamental dynamic is that engaged voters don't
| want to see significantly more people living in the region,
| and therefore it doesn't happen.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Yeah, it has a lot to do with selfishness. More housing
| means more people means you have a lower property value
| for you home in the area. Further, it means your vote
| becomes less powerful as the poors that live in the high
| rise have the same voting power as you do in your single
| family home.
| amluto wrote:
| I think it has a lot to do with people believing what you
| just said. Which is, of course, utter nonsense! If a
| neighborhood suddenly gets rezoned for 20-story mixed-use
| development, an existing _house_ will be devalued, but an
| existing _lot_ will likely gain more then enough value to
| compensate.
| cogman10 wrote:
| > Which is, of course, utter nonsense!
|
| That doesn't change the loss of voting power. Further,
| value to who? I agree a 20 story high-rise has more value
| than a single-family home, but how does that help the
| single-family homeowner or the homeowners that live
| around the lot that gets rezoned?
|
| That's the problem. The existing homes and their owners
| seem mostly downsides to rezoning even though the city as
| a whole would benefit greatly from them.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| Is it selfish to have national parks when there are
| people that are homeless and the government could give
| them literally free land?
|
| Long ago the people that lived in the area realized that
| they liked where they lived and how it was, and voted to
| put in place rules to keep it that way. It sucks now, I
| and all my friends the grew up there were forced to move
| somewhere affordable, but it's not pure selfishness. They
| didn't take something away from someone else, no one else
| ever had it. And to expand it does inherently change the
| nature of what 'it' is and opens a genie that can NEVER
| be put back.
| astrange wrote:
| > Long ago the people that lived in the area realized
| that they liked where they lived and how it was
|
| Ignoring that there were probably Indians there - that
| wasn't "long ago", residential zoning was mostly
| introduced in the 30s-60s. America hasn't had zoning for
| most of its life!
|
| Most other countries have never had it and still don't.
|
| (Except every other Anglo country has an even /worse/
| planning system than American residential zoning.)
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| Am I wrong to use when this issue started as the
| discussion starting point? Or are you agreeing that it is
| unfair to force a living situation change on a native
| population because other people want to move in or force
| their say about things?
|
| Zoning was introduced in the USA in 1904. The USA was
| 'urbanized' in 1920 the first time more Americans lived
| in cities than the rural countryside. Our zoning laws fit
| with the time period when we would develop things like...
| zoning laws.
|
| When my family moved to the Bay Area huge parts of it was
| fruit trees (with another large part being future
| superfund toxic waste dumps).
|
| If you were to drive (because they aren't designed for
| walking) along the 'Walmart strip' of any town in the USA
| I can't see how you can argue 'the USA has too strong of
| city planning'. Our growth is the stuff of ugly, out of
| control, unwalkable, car requiring nightmares.
| astrange wrote:
| > Am I wrong to use when this issue started as the
| discussion starting point?
|
| You're wrong about when it started. It's a lot more
| recent than that. We didn't build this way in 1904; we
| couldn't have afforded to live like this because we
| didn't have cars. A lot of places in the US were actually
| bulldozed since then to replace them with streets and
| parking.
|
| American zoning specifically was introduced in California
| for the sole reason of keeping Chinese immigrants out of
| white neighborhoods - the idea was that if you banned
| running a business out of your home, they wouldn't be
| able to afford the neighborhood. (See "The Color of
| Law"... or you can read the city council minutes because,
| like, that's why they said they did it.)
|
| But it's been kept since then mainly because of the
| assumption that everyone will own a car; cars cause
| traffic, so you can't attract them or strangers will make
| noise and park in front of your house.
|
| Funny enough, another reason it's been kept in California
| is that 70s environmentalists read "Urban Growth Engines"
| and "The Population Bomb" and decided it was good because
| more expensive housing would stop people from having
| children. This is probably the inspiration for that
| Thanos guy.
|
| > If you were to drive (because they aren't designed for
| walking) along the 'Walmart strip' of any town in the USA
| I can't see how you can argue 'the USA has too strong of
| city planning'.
|
| Those are entirely caused by city planning. For one
| thing, no developer would want to build this way because
| it's not profitable - all that concrete for surface
| parking spaces is super expensive and nobody is using it.
| Parking minimums, stroads, federal highway funding,
| height limits and NIMBYs all come together to create
| sprawl. (See "Strong Towns".)
|
| Oh, and fear that denser housing would lead to everyone
| dying in a nuclear war, that too.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Part of the equation must be the simple fact that the US is
| big and has the option to give many people the 0.1+ acre
| detached single family home with a yard and 2+ car
| driveway/garage lifestyle (and schools with more exclusive
| student populations).
|
| In smaller places, that simply isn't an option, so there
| exists greater demand for family living in high rises.
| ghaff wrote:
| Yeah, very few people who want and can afford 3-bedroom
| homes want to be renting apartments. I assume that even
| in New York City, the number of 3-bedroom condos is
| pretty minimal as a percentage because most people who
| want that kind of space just move to West Chester or
| Connecticut.
| structural wrote:
| This is not universally true, and it's pretty common to
| hear people who moved out to the suburbs hate it, but
| they needed the third or even second bedroom! Slightly
| larger condos simply didn't exist on the market, or were
| priced at astronomic rates (double the $/sqft compared to
| a 1bd unit).
|
| Looked at a dozen midrise buildings this year across
| DC/Phila/NYC markets, some new/recent construction, some
| office conversions. Most buildings had zero 3bd units
| except for maybe a single penthouse, a 2bd unit every
| other floor, and the entire rest of the building evenly
| divided between studios and 1bd units in the 400-600sqft
| range. The competition for the 2bd units was unreal, in
| several cases people were offering the entire year's
| lease upfront, in cash, to secure an apartment.
|
| It really is that competitive and the demand is there,
| the supply is not.
| sgu999 wrote:
| Part of the problem is what is available. If you're a
| Japanese or a Taiwanese, that detached single family home
| with a massive garden around it is simply not an option,
| so you don't feel worst off than anyone else by living in
| a small house or in a high rise.
|
| Other advantage is that keeping cities very dense and
| preventing urban sprawl means everyone has access to
| nature quickly, through public transports.
| astrange wrote:
| Oh, those kind of houses are definitely available in
| Japan. Houses in Japan are worth negative money; if you
| want to sell one the buyer will want you to knock it down
| first.
|
| The reason they're so cheap is that nobody wants to live
| in those areas because cities are better and have better
| jobs.
| colechristensen wrote:
| >Rental housing with 3+ bedrooms (for families) is severely
| lacking in much of the US. Maybe fire codes are to blame.
| Taiwan is full of very nice new high-rise development that
| contains units with lots of bedrooms. Wandering around
| those developments and the new 3-story developments in
| California, the ones in Taiwan are much, much, much nicer,
| even from the outside. The NIMBYs should take note.
|
| And it's because of zoning. Cities allow density
| construction but then it's almost exclusively 0 and 1
| bedroom apartments because you can charge more per sq ft.
| Zoning laws should _force_ apartment construction to
| include multiple bedroom units but that would lower the
| cost of 1br units. So NIMBYs don 't want density
| construction, and the people who build density don't want
| big units.
|
| So cities are unlivable if you're not young and single or
| happy living in relative squalor. So people either don't
| have children or have to move to have children and you get
| cities that push out a big chunk of the demographic and
| then force people to commute.
| foobarian wrote:
| How could we get a council of a half-dozen visionaries to
| own a city-sized chunk of land and design a utopia,
| communist party-style but done right? I really think this
| is not possible without it being a private parcel where
| there aren't thousands of individual property owners in
| the loop for decision making.
| colechristensen wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_utopian_co
| mmu...
|
| People try this thing on a fairly regular basis.
|
| You're thinking "wouldn't it be great if there was a
| community led by an absolute authority which agrees with
| me" and, uh, that kind of thing doesn't scale, last, or
| continue agreeing with you for a particularly long amount
| of time.
|
| >I really think this is not possible without it being a
| private parcel where there aren't thousands of individual
| property owners in the loop for decision making.
|
| This is just saying democracy is bad. Ok, but go find me
| an example of something else that has actually worked.
|
| It's troubling how people think dictatorship is the
| solution to their problems these days. It's not even one
| particular viewpoint that falls into this, people of all
| positions are increasingly advocating for authoritarian
| solutions.
| foobarian wrote:
| > This is just saying democracy is bad
|
| It's more subtle than that, because it depends on the
| scope. Democracy is already not applied in many contexts
| today, such as most private corporations. In fact I think
| large companies have many analogous features to communist
| governments what with the central control and absolute
| authority.
|
| There is certainly no suggestion that a whole state or
| country should be switched over to an authoritarian
| regime; of course we all know the classic "we tried this
| already and it didn't work" line.
|
| There are a lot of cult-ish or vaguely religion-based
| communities out there. But that's not what I have in
| mind.
|
| You tend to see a lot of lament in here on HN or other
| similar forums about things like car-centric suburban
| hellscapes, poor walkability, bike paths, what have you.
| Meanwhile in urban settings where these things are better
| solved there is the problem that property values are sky
| high, and create an elite environment that turn away
| support roles and cause a new set of problems.
|
| I would love to see some tech billionaire drive an
| innovative design over a metro-sized zone. Maybe don't
| have roads and cars except for deliveries, use roads for
| cycles and pedestrians? Have a subway built before
| anything else? High-rise mixed-use buildings with
| important services like free child-care and urgent care?
| Have golf-cart-like EVs easily available for short-term
| rent. Free stupid-fast WiFi/Internet etc.
|
| Kind of like a college campus but scaled up? Maybe the
| crazy sheiks in Dubai will manage it.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Again, this happens regularly, they don't actually work.
|
| You're advocating for local government to be a
| dictatorship. Private enterprise is not the same as a
| government with power over people and land.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telosa
|
| >Telosa is a proposed utopian planned US city conceived
| by American billionaire Marc Lore and announced in
| September 2021.
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2024/08/23/marc-andreessens-
| family-pl...
|
| >California Forever is a proposed master-planned
| community, to be carved from over 60,000 acres of land
| that several members of Silicon Valley's elite have
| quietly been buying in Solano County since 2017.
|
| Here's some more: https://www.scmp.com/magazines/style/ce
| lebrity/article/32166...
|
| >There are a lot of cult-ish or vaguely religion-based
| communities out there. But that's not what I have in
| mind.
|
| Honestly, people and their zoning/walkable/anti-
| car/density/environmental ideals and desire for a little
| dictatorship to create it is pretty indistinguishable
| from all the other cult community efforts. The hippies
| wanted free love and drugs or whatever, the luddites
| wanted no technology, everybody wanted their set of
| things. Nobody thinks their cult is a cult, they think
| they have great ideas, only what those _other_ people are
| doing is a cult.
|
| Seriously it's troubling how folks think billionaires and
| dictatorships are going to save them and can't even
| conceive of a community built on a strong foundation of
| well executed differing opinions compromising to achieve
| the best outcome.
|
| Folks just want their opinions and only their opinions
| made real by force and absolute power. It's insane that
| people don't recognize how many people have tried before
| and the awful things that happen when it fails.
| foobarian wrote:
| For me it's a pleasant thing to ponder, especially when
| faced with the above mentioned existing problems.
|
| > It's insane that people don't recognize how many people
| have tried before and the awful things that happen when
| it fails.
|
| I think it's just human nature, perhaps even more so in
| an engineering community. Look at how much of scientific
| progress follows that pattern, and even worse with the
| participants fully recognizing the immense amounts of
| preceding failures.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Advocating for dictatorships isn't a fun little
| intellectual exercise.
| spencerflem wrote:
| I think that's a response to the sort of obstructionate
| governance republicans have been doing. 27 laws total
| were passed by the senate in 2023 half of which were
| trivial things like commemorative coins.
| colechristensen wrote:
| The party in power complains about the inactivity of the
| Congress because minority party obstruction.
|
| The majority party has the full opportunity to get rid of
| the fillibuster, and yet does not. (pick a year to
| determine which party is assigned to which role)
|
| The lack of activity is just as much the Democrats'
| fault, they have had plenty of opportunity to try to
| change procedure but they have not.
| prewett wrote:
| > How could we ... design a utopia, communist party-style
| but done right?
|
| We can't. Certainly not until people stop being self-
| oriented, and stop being willing to sacrifice others for
| their own benefit. Recorded history says this is not
| going to happen. Even the one (as far as I understand)
| religion concerned with transforming human nature to love
| others sacrificially, Christianity, says this requires
| divine help. (There is even a book, "Critical Journey"
| that identifies the stages of spiritual life, with the
| life of sacrificial love as the sixth and last. Given the
| difficulty and slowness that even people who are
| committed to the journey find, getting to the life of
| sacrificial live probably requires multiple decades. So
| even within Christianity this quality is rare.)
|
| Also, since Communism builds on Marxist ideas, which are
| founded on the idea of power, a Communist utopia is
| impossible, since the asserting of of power is the
| opposite of loving others sacrificially. And, indeed,
| 100% of the Communist states resulted in totalitarian
| dictatorships.
| kagakuninja wrote:
| The billionaires are trying that in California, and us
| peasants are quite suspicious of the deal...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Forever
| kmeisthax wrote:
| The first step is don't do this, central planning is a
| canonical bad idea. Case in point: NIMBYism works
| _because_ cities are _already_ masterplanned,
| "communist-party-style". American suburbia _is_ commie
| blocks. So all you have to do when someone wants to
| change the plan is to have two or three people shout
| "no" at the city council and for nobody else to show up.
|
| If you actually want higher-density, what you actually
| want is national or state laws that restrict what zoning
| can restrict. Japan is a good model for this: they have a
| nationalized zoning plan. Individual city councils can
| only pick specific zones from a list of varying densities
| of mixed commercial/residential zones and industrial
| zones.
|
| A lot of the harms of suburban life are _specific_ to the
| segregation of commercial and residential: moving people
| away from the places they want to go to means they need a
| car, and the infrastructure to use it with, which takes
| up space, which pushes everything else away, which
| creates more demand for cars and car infrastructure, and
| so on. Conversely, we could imagine, say, taking a few
| lots in an otherwise single-family development and
| turning them into convenience stores or something, which
| would be something people could just walk to.
|
| Once you have the legal capacity to build you can then
| start talking about having government money go into
| buying and developing upzoned property. Private ownership
| and developers will follow. The goal is not to bring
| about some specific master plan but to just generally
| increase access to land and housing. You can run it as a
| co-op if you want but do not, for the love of god,
| micromanage people into wishing they had their $500k
| mortgaged single-family homes that they """owned""" back.
| Wytwwww wrote:
| But isn't housing extremely unaffordable in Taipei (and
| presumably rest of Taiwan)? Price per m2 is comparable to
| San Francisco or San Jose but median earnings are several
| times lower.
| amluto wrote:
| Not just zoning. Those high rises have units with lots of
| bedrooms around a central elevator core, and you can't
| build those in the US.
| geodel wrote:
| All true. The question still remains how many US folks can
| /want to go live in Taiwan vs How many Taiwanese can / want
| to live in US suburban dystopia. And I say this as
| immigrant to US increasingly disenchanted by suburbia.
|
| From what I read housing price to income ratio has
| increased ~2.5 times from 6.5 to 15.8 in last two decades
| in Taiwan. And it seems to be worse in new developments in
| city like Taipei.
|
| At a top echelon of Taiwan society or as a tourist it must
| be nice live, roam around in pleasant urban environments
| compare to US suburbia but I am not sure average Taiwanese
| are finding life great with stagnating wages and
| unaffordable housing.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| As a non US citizen, I think there are a lot of high
| level cultural issues that would prevent me considering a
| job in the US, well before I pulled out a calculator and
| starting comparing salary to cost of living.
|
| I won't enumerate them because it would be sure to offend
| somebody (everybody?).
| nick3443 wrote:
| You yada yada'd over the best part!
| geodel wrote:
| That would make sense. There are really lot of reasons to
| not take job offer in US. And even after taking offer
| many may find job sucks in ways they have not initially
| thought of.
|
| The only thing that's unlikely to happen is all good
| things one like to become available at a place one likes
| to live.
| kilotaras wrote:
| > Non-housing costs are quite low in Taiwan. Food and
| childcare, in particular, are so much cheaper than
| California that it's hard to believe.
|
| Those are downstream of housing restrictions to a large
| extent. From "Housing theory of everything" [0]:
|
| Consider a cleaner living in Alabama. In 1960 they could
| move to NYC and earn wages 84% higher, and still end up
| with 70% higher income after rent. In 2010, they could move
| to New York City and become 28% more productive, and earn a
| wage 28% higher - and reduce the surplus of workers back
| home, letting them demand higher pay. But since housing
| costs are so much higher, the net earnings and living
| standards of someone like this would fall if they moved
| today, and wouldn't be worth it. The same would be true for
| plumbers, receptionists and other professions that allow
| other people to specialise at what they're best at and
| minimise the time they spend on things like DIY and
| answering the phone. By contrast, top lawyers get wage
| boosts that are still sufficiently higher to justify a move
| in both 1960 and 2010, even after the higher rents they'll
| have to pay.
|
| [0] https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-
| every...
| efitz wrote:
| Anyone looking to start a new manufacturing business
| would be insane to consider California for any number of
| reasons- cost-of-living, (urban) quality of life,
| regulatory environment, state taxes, etc.
|
| Right now manufacturers should be considering other
| states. Florida, Tennessee and Texas all are income-tax-
| free and have business friendly regulatory climates.
| Several states like Alabama and West Virginia offer
| extremely low cost-of-living and property costs and
| likely would negotiate tax abatements.
| apercu wrote:
| Does anyone truly want to live in Florida, Texas,
| Alabama, WV? (I left Tennessee off the list because it
| seems a lot to people _do_ want to live in Nashville
| anyway).
|
| I grew up in Texas. I've lived in 5 states and a Canadian
| province.
|
| My sisters house in Fort Worth is assessed a little lower
| than my house in WI. But her property tax is more than my
| property tax plus WI state income tax so.....
| murderfs wrote:
| Florida and Texas are among the fastest growing states in
| the country, whereas California is losing population.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| And how many of the traditional demographics of tech
| workers do you think want to move to Florida? It is
| currently my home state and I work remotely. But I'm
| older. I would never want to live here if my wife were
| younger or I thought there was any chance we wanted to
| become pregnant.
| decafninja wrote:
| I don't know, Miami is pretty nice. The only reason I
| wouldn't consider living in Miami is that if I ever got
| laid off, the tech job ecosystem is poor at best.
|
| It's not perfect but neither is SFBA, NYC, or Seattle.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Until you have to pay the skyrocketing insurance costs.
|
| I am not blaming the government for that. It's just life
| when you live in an area with frequent hurricanes
| p1esk wrote:
| After many years in CA I love it in Florida. Palm Beach
| or Boca Raton are very nice, schools are excellent,
| weather is perfect 7 months out of 12. And houses are
| significantly cheaper than in equivalent areas in CA.
| Less woke culture too.
| astrange wrote:
| The population increasing in a state is mostly about age
| structure of the country, not people deciding to move
| there. California's low growth and Florida's high growth
| are because Americans are getting older, retiring, and
| not having children.
| murderfs wrote:
| This is absolutely false, to the point where there's
| literally a wikipedia article about net migration out of
| California:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_exodus
| decafninja wrote:
| Florida and Texas don't belong on the same list as WV and
| Alabama.
|
| I can see why even a deep blue liberal might hold their
| nose and move to FL or TX. I can't see why you'd do so
| for AL or WV.
| kagakuninja wrote:
| Texas actually has higher taxes than California, despite
| the lack of income tax. They make up for it in property
| tax AFAIK. California actually has low property taxes for
| many property owners, thanks to the controversial
| proposition 13.
|
| Desirable urban areas of California are expensive because
| we don't have enough housing.
| eric-hu wrote:
| > Desirable urban areas of California are expensive
| because we don't have enough housing.
|
| I hear this a lot about California and other places. But
| I also know lots of people look to buy a 2nd, 3rd, etc
| property for rental income. For those homeowners, buying
| more property is rational because it's an investment they
| already understand. They can reap economy of scale
| benefits, even at a low multiple like 2-3 properties:
| water heaters, dishwashers etc become easier to maintain.
| The incentives are strong for homeowners to buy rental
| property. And they're in a stronger position to buy than
| renters.
|
| My gut tells me that 7-8 of every 10 new houses built are
| bought with the intention to rent it out. It seems like
| "build more homes" will result in current property owners
| owning more property to rent out, and most renters will
| still be renters.
| kagakuninja wrote:
| Then that would result in lower cost rental units. While
| not what everyone wants, it would be a great improvement
| over the current situation. There are also ways to create
| tax incentives that could discourage your scenario from
| happening.
| spockz wrote:
| This is a large reason why many of our larger
| municipalities now forbid to buy a home in their zone if
| it isn't (going to be) your primary residence. It seems
| to be working quite well.
| astrange wrote:
| The only thing that matters is how many homes there are;
| stuff like this and vacancy taxes has barely any effect.
| The main reason to do it is if you want to appear to
| solve the problem without actually trying to solve it.
|
| The main reason anyone would own two SFHs is that you
| need to do this in order to move. If you sell your first
| home before moving you're homeless. And after that it can
| take a long time to find a buyer.
|
| They're a bad rental investment though because it's way
| too risky to own one; one bad renter or one roof
| replacement means you've lost money.
| eric-hu wrote:
| That sounds like a policy I can get behind. Can you share
| a name of such a policy or a link to one?
| astrange wrote:
| Houses are not built with any particular intent.
| Developers and property owners are not the same people,
| and don't even have the same interests. Single family
| homes for rental are actually quite rare and most
| businesses that try to enter the market fail and leave
| again.
| taormina wrote:
| As a Texan, who has considered moving to California many
| times, this is laughable. I pay maybe $10k-$11k in
| property taxes (https://tax-
| office.traviscountytx.gov/properties/taxes/estim...). I
| work for myself at the moment, but if I took my previous
| salary of $200k and earned that in CA instead, I would
| owe CA closer to $15k, and I'm not grandfathered into
| prop 13. Never once in my career has the math made any
| sense for living in CA over TX from a tax perspective.
| And you if you don't own your property, you don't owe TX
| anything.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| And you would be crazy to move your company to Florida
| where if you got on the wrong side of the governor, he
| would go out of his way to punish you.
|
| Florida is my current home state.
|
| You would be much better off moving to GA, TN, AL or
| almost any other southern state with more traditional
| business friendly Republicans.
|
| And this isn't meant to be a Republican vs Democrat
| thing. More so a "business friendly traditional
| Republican" vs "culture warrior Republicans".
|
| I have no opinion of how Democrats run their states. I've
| only lived in two states my entire life - GA and FL. I
| don't keep up with state politics in other states.
| qwytw wrote:
| > Taiwan is full of very nice new high-rise development
| that contains units with lots of bedrooms
|
| But presumably you'll never be able to buy and will have to
| rent forever? Real estate is significantly more expensive
| in Taiwan relative to income than in SF/etc.
| J_Shelby_J wrote:
| Is a market where housing supply meets demand, housing is
| a depreciating asset. Why would you want to buy if
| renting is cheaper?
| qwytw wrote:
| > Is a market where housing supply meets demand, housing
| is a depreciating asset.
|
| How so? Supposedly house prices increased by 50% in 5
| years there. So obviously it does not meet demand...
|
| > Why would you want to buy if renting is cheaper?
|
| Because it's usually considerably cheaper long-term? Rent
| prices go up all the time, so you'd lose a very
| significant amount of money over 10-20+ years.
| pchristensen wrote:
| The primary problem for getting 3+ bedroom apartments built
| in America is school funding. School districts are mostly
| locally funded (sometimes with a portion funded by the
| state government) and almost entirely from property taxes.
| At a very high level, schools are funded by the acre and
| their expenses scale with the 2nd-5th bedrooms in their
| district. A 4 bedroom apartment or condo and a 4 bedroom
| house will usually pay very different tax rates, so local
| governments are highly incentivized to deny and obstruct
| large apartments. A 2 bedroom apartment with one child is
| one thing, but a 4 bedroom apartment with 3-5 children is a
| huge money loser.
|
| That's also an obstacle to a lot of cities densifying and
| intensifying. Built out cities have a model that lets them
| operate, but not capital or land to build and expand in
| areas of high growth and demand. That's just one of many
| factors that are freezing our cities in amber.
| ak217 wrote:
| I don't think your analysis is valid in California.
| Public high schools in California receive most of their
| funding on a per-pupil, attendance-weighted basis from
| the state on a redistributive basis (all property taxes
| from across the state are pooled and redistributed).
| ghshephard wrote:
| Parcel Taxes allow wealthy areas like Palo Alto to have
| much higher qualities of education. School District
| quality is probably one of the number one factors for
| families looking for a home.
| ak217 wrote:
| Most school districts in California don't have any parcel
| taxes. There are definitely some like Palo Alto and other
| Bay Area and LA school districts that do, but they serve
| as a relatively small boost (0 to 25% of the district's
| budget). But yes, to the extent they constitute a
| significant portion of the revenue, the dynamics
| described by the parent post play a role.
|
| Parcel taxes are known to be a poor funding mechanism for
| this reason, but they were the only viable way to to work
| around the toxic side effects of Proposition 13
| (https://ed100.org/lessons/parceltax), which illustrates
| its long shadow in California state law. Prop 13 is of
| course responsible for multiple other self-reinforcing
| anti-growth incentive loops.
| astrange wrote:
| > The primary problem for getting 3+ bedroom apartments
| built in America is school funding.
|
| It actually is mostly at the state level, namely fire
| codes and condo defect laws. America has building codes
| designed not for safety but to make single family homes
| cheaper and apartments more expensive. One of the things
| they do is require double stairways for tall enough
| buildings, with the result that all apartments must be
| built like hotels. That plus the requirement for a window
| on bedrooms makes it hard to fit them in.
| zelon88 wrote:
| > Non-housing costs are quite low in Taiwan. Food and
| childcare, in particular, are so much cheaper than
| California that it's hard to believe.
|
| That statement is the problem.
|
| Nobody wants to rent. There are too many rental properties,
| and not enough affordable housing. The reason you need
| rental properties is because you're already trying to make
| a living from families having a home. You're not supposed
| to do that. That's supposed to be the prize for the family
| for assimilating with capitalism. By buying it and renting
| it back to them you're disincentivizing the working class
| from working.
|
| But by all means, keep privatizing the shit out of 3
| bedroom family homes and see what happens. Take every drop
| of value out of the housing market and bank it. That's what
| pitchforks are for.
| schmidtleonard wrote:
| The purpose of capitalism is to establish, reinforce, and
| perpetuate a class hierarchy where the people on the
| bottom must constantly pay to exist while the people on
| top constantly get paid to exist. This shit isn't a side
| effect, it's the entire point of the exercise.
| graymatters wrote:
| Spoken like a true Marxist. The purpose of Marxism is to
| literally kill hundreds of millions of people who oppose
| the Marxist way. Like they did during the 20th century in
| the countries where Marxism prevailed (even briefly).
| astrange wrote:
| It is not spoken like a true Marxist; they didn't even
| believe this. Here's Engels saying being a renter is not
| exploitation:
|
| https://x.com/TheOmniZaddy/status/1559949666543878151
|
| Georgism is better though, and the homeownership market
| isn't about "capitalism".
| madmask wrote:
| Capitalism gives you opportunities to climb the ladder
| angelaguilera wrote:
| Capitalism also continuously adds steps to that ladder
| closeparen wrote:
| The relevant world-historical political philosophy here
| is feudalism: land ownership and hereditary relationships
| to land are paramount, people should mostly stay where
| they were born, merchant/capitalist/productive sources of
| wealth and income are a suspicious, threatening upstart
| that we landowners, the legitimate heirs of political
| power, must keep in check.
|
| The landowners in this case happen to think of themselves
| as middle class.
| closeparen wrote:
| Unfortunately in their rejection of capitalism, the
| people have mostly decided to do feudalism, i.e.
| legitimacy comes from land ownership and land tenure. It
| is even hereditary: heirs get to pay much lower property
| tax than transplants.
|
| I don't think we're going to see eye to eye on
| capitalism, but even Marx would agree with me that it's
| better than feudalism.
| ak217 wrote:
| Absolutely true. Also I find it strange that the companies
| in question could easily resolve their workforce issues by
| forming a fund to build better/faster public transit to
| link up their offices with less NIMBY-dominated cities, but
| choose not to do so.
| closeparen wrote:
| Transportation rights-of-way invoke all the same NIMBY
| problems, only worse because an individual holdout parcel
| sinks the whole thing.
|
| What they can do is run buses on existing public roads.
| And they do that. It's still like 1.5+ hours from the
| Tri-Valley to SF.
| ak217 wrote:
| I don't think the lack of usable rights-of-way explains
| public transit issues in the Silicon Valley.
|
| Tech companies had very modest participation in the
| Caltrain PCEP project, and still barely participate in
| the Dumbarton rail corridor planning, have made no direct
| moves to expedite or simplify the BART Silicon Valley
| expansion, have not attempted to improve the performance
| of VTA light rail, have not publicly tried to pressure
| the SF city government to expedite or simplify Caltrain
| DTC, and have made no proposals to make use of vacant or
| underutilized rail or ex-rail rights-of-way across the
| Silicon Valley where no NIMBY opposition exists. (Yes,
| Atherton is famous for its NIMBYs blocking the original
| HSR construction plan. It's not currently relevant and
| can be bypassed.)
| kbolino wrote:
| The federalized nature of American government means both
| things can be true simultaneously, even though they seem
| paradoxical when placed together in juxtaposition. The Feds
| have supremacy in certain matters, but not all.
|
| Moreover, lobbying is more a question of connections and
| relationships which are lubricated with money than pure
| spending power, so it can be easier for a large corporation
| to nudge things its way at the national and state levels
| while still struggling to curry influence at the local level,
| and vice versa for small companies.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| > trillion-dollar industries at the forefront of the global
| economy constantly getting their shit rocked by a few dozen
| NIMBY retirees at city council meetings
|
| A lot of Intel R&D (and all their manufacturing) is outside
| the Bay Area, i.e., Oregon and elsewhere, so not sure this is
| a factor in their case.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| The thing that makes America a corporate-dominated oligarchy
| is veto rights. The American middle class has enough
| political power to get issues on the table but not to
| overcome an anonymous rich person saying "no". NIMBYism is
| the same underlying power - vetocracy. So corporations would
| have to spend way more time fighting their own power to get
| things done.
| closeparen wrote:
| This is an insightful synthesis, thank you.
| FredPret wrote:
| It's grim at INTC but don't forget the CHIPS act and whatever
| else will follow that. The US government spends 0.5T per month
| - more than the market cap of all but the top 15 American
| companies [0] [1]
|
| Not saying it's a good or bad idea, or that it will or won't
| happen - but if the US government decides to reinvent Intel,
| they can easily write a cheque that (if spent wisely) might do
| the trick.
|
| [0] https://companiesmarketcap.com/usa/largest-companies-in-
| the-...
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget
| twobitshifter wrote:
| Intel is underserving of this investment and the chips act
| has no teeth to ensure that they follow through and build
| these facilities and create jobs. They will not follow
| through and spend the money wisely and that was clear from
| the moment that bill was drafted.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| > has no teeth
|
| CHIPS act money is milestone based, and no money has yet
| been paid out, according to the article.
|
| That sounds like teeth to me.
| kridsdale3 wrote:
| Why doesn't the USA just buy out all of Intel's debt, let
| them start fresh? Call it a Silicon Era War Bond, in reverse.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Better to help another company with better management.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| I worked for Intel in the 90s.
|
| I think the company always paid "industry standard" compared to
| other companies paying actually well. And it was a terrible
| place to work by most objective measures - people got let go
| quite freely, etc. When Andy Grove writes a book called "Only
| The Paranoid Survive", he's not committing to employee loyalty.
|
| I think the way Intel got good people, and they did get good
| people, was by a combination of the opportunity to build
| something that gets widely used and a cult-like spirit of "are
| you good and tough enough to survive the bullshit".
|
| But yeah, seems there's no recovery when that approach stops
| working. And it's disturbing that many of America's "crown
| jewels" (Intel, Boeing, etc) are basically constructed that
| way.
| jeffparsons wrote:
| I think if Intel was a private company then it would have a
| better chance of recovery via a collection of focused
| experiments to overcome their biggest technical deficiencies
| (compared to their competitors) or to, e.g., figure out a
| compelling new product that the market didn't realise it
| needed, but that doesn't require solving difficult physics
| problems.
|
| But to do this sort of thing you need a dictator at the top who
| is willing to risk a run of negative-profit quarters to fix the
| company's underlying rot. If you try to do anything like that
| as a leader of a public company, then shareholders tend to get
| angry.
|
| I wonder if there's any lesson that could be distilled from the
| (minority of?) public companies that don't end up settling into
| a pattern of carefully-managed mediocrity. Is there a unifying
| theme? I haven't spent enough time thinking about this to even
| propose an answer other than "cult of personality around the
| leader" as maybe helping.
| theevilsharpie wrote:
| > But to do this sort of thing you need a dictator at the top
| who is willing to risk a run of negative-profit quarters to
| fix the company's underlying rot.
|
| Private companies still have shareholders that the CEO
| answers to -- who tend to get angry at taking losses quarter
| after quarter with no clear path to growth.
| TheAmazingRace wrote:
| I'm still hopeful of the fact that Intel is, in many aspects "too
| big to fail", and with their cash on hand, they have enough of a
| burn rate to turn this ship around, even if they aren't being as
| intense on cutbacks as they should be.
|
| The question remains, will Intel survive in its current form or
| could an activist investor stir up a hostile takeover and change
| the calculus?
| mnau wrote:
| On the other hand, Intel is small enough to rescue. $82bn
| (market cap) is not the amount of money it used to be.
| linuxftw wrote:
| Intel has $29B cash on hand. Their new fabs are being subsidized.
| Sure, American labor is more expensive than APAC, but I don't see
| that being a huge differentiator in such an automated
| manufacturing segment.
|
| My personal rabbit-hole conspiracy is that AI is driving a fire
| under the national security apparatus, and we're going to see a
| restriction on AI-chip technology being exported or manufactured
| overseas. Intel will be in prime position to onshore that
| manufacturing.
| crowcroft wrote:
| $29b cash and about $50b in debt. They have a valid business
| still, but I think you're under appreciating how much of a hole
| they need to dig themselves out of.
|
| Their current foundries can't just make other chips, and they
| certainly can't make GPUs for AI (TSMC make Intel GPUs). They
| are making a new foundry in Ohio, but in Intel's current state
| and comments they've made to the market it's not guaranteed the
| foundry will be built.
|
| Intel might make it out of the hole, but it's going to get
| worse before it gets better. At their current trajectory their
| is not valid reason for the company to have 100,000 employees.
| I expect the recent layoffs are the first of a few.
| rstuart4133 wrote:
| > $29b cash and about $50b in debt.
|
| I know nothing about finance, but I have trouble figuring out
| how they got themselves into this situation given this
| https://www.intc.com/stock-info/dividends-and-buybacks :
| As of June 29th, 2024, we were authorized to repurchase up to
| $110.0 billion, of which $7.24 billion remain available. We
| have repurchased 5.77 billion shares at a cost of $152.05
| billion since the program began in 1990.
|
| Had they not bought there own shares they would be sitting on
| $70B cash and no debt.
| happycube wrote:
| Ouuuuch. There oughta (still) be a law.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I wonder if Global Foundries will become relevant again on the
| high end. They "gave up," but they are working on some pretty
| small nodes now, 12nm, obviously not what TSMC is up to, but
| maybe they'll catch Intel in 10 years. I'm sure they are fine for
| automotive.
| onepointsixC wrote:
| They're 4-5 nodes behind Intel today, with no EUV machines let
| alone High NA EUV. They're just not relevant in leading edge in
| the slightest.
| ars wrote:
| Did I misunderstand or did the author advocate a world where the
| only high-end chip manufacturer in the entire world is TMSC?
|
| Just the one single company, located in a politically unstable
| area?
|
| And putting aside the politics, if they become a monopoly what do
| you think will happen next?
| randerson wrote:
| Purely from the perspective of Intel and their shareholders it
| makes sense. But it's obviously a terrible idea for the world
| at large. TSMC and ASML need US based alternatives.
| manav wrote:
| Intel was getting something like $20 billion from the CHIPS act -
| but it seems like by the time the fabs would have been ready TSMC
| will already have them beat to 1.4nm/a14 (also using High NA
| EUV). Intel has just consistently failed to execute whereas TSMC
| has been fairly close to schedule.
| newsclues wrote:
| What happens to the computer and tech industry if Intel fails?
|
| The x86 licence still has value to some others in the space, but
| it seems like Intel could potentially be sold off for parts if it
| can't sell correct.
| andreasmetsala wrote:
| ARM wins the instruction set wars and buys the tech. Future ARM
| processors will have x86 hardware that offers compatibility
| with legacy software. Eventually the instruction set is
| forgotten.
| kbolino wrote:
| Why/how would the death of Intel kill off AMD too?
| magicalhippo wrote:
| Got me thinking, from what I've read, modern high-performance
| cores do a lot of similar tricks and translate everything to
| uops anyway.
|
| How hard would it be for say AMD to make a performant dual-
| ISA CPU?
|
| I was thinking somewhat like how virtual 8086 mode[1] worked
| on 32bit CPUs, ie OS could be ARM-based, but it could run x86
| processes.
|
| I assume it would be hard to not sacrifice performance for
| one of the ISAs, but if it's for legacy applications you
| wouldn't need top speed necessarily.
|
| Are ARM and x86 just too different to make it work? Are there
| other obstacles?
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_8086_mode
| astrange wrote:
| > Got me thinking, from what I've read, modern high-
| performance cores do a lot of similar tricks and translate
| everything to uops anyway.
|
| It's not really true. The uops are highly related to the
| input instructions. There's enough room in a big desktop
| CPU to fit a big complex decoder yes, but it's a waste of
| space you could be using for other things, namely even more
| caches.
|
| But the main reason not to do it is that you can do
| emulation or recompilation in software instead.
| 015a wrote:
| I'm not sure if I buy the thesis entirely (that thesis most aptly
| being: "Gelsinger does have one fatal flaw: he still believes in
| Intel, and I no longer do.")
|
| The biggest reason is geopolitics: If escalated confrontation
| happens with China, Intel becomes one of the most valuable
| companies on the planet, period. TSMC will finish western fabs
| eventually, but the delta-t on when they become competitive
| (tech, capacity & cost, remember) with even Intel's western fabs
| is... decades, plural? Maybe never? The CHIPS act helped, but
| TSMC is dragging their feet for very, very (existentially) good
| reason. Also, remember that TSMC is built entirely on the back of
| ASML; conflict with China doesn't just block the west's access to
| the east's fab capacity, it blocks the east's access to the
| west's tooling to build more and better fabs. TSMC craters in
| this scenario. Samsung also exists. That's the list of near-SotA
| fab capacity, globally.
|
| Capacity is another good reason: TSMC is not a bottomless bucket,
| and every year for the past at least two years Apple has
| purchased 100% of their SotA fab capacity. No one is competing
| with Apple's margins (except Nvidia, but that's a bubble market;
| numbered days). His argument is that there's no market reason for
| Intel's fabs to exist; we don't have the data to say for certain,
| but I'd guess that if Intel went to TSMC and said "you're already
| making lunar lake, make our xeon chips too" TSMC would say "we
| can't" (especially on SotA nodes, but maybe even near-SotA).
| They're tapped out, they grow, they're instantly tapped out
| again, everyone wants what they're selling. Intel fabs Lunar Lake
| and Arc with TSMC; both very-low volume.
|
| Also worth keeping in mind: Intel was at one time the global
| leader in chip fabrication; but they lost that crown. People view
| TSMC as this unassailable beast, but they're just as fallible;
| and when I hear people say "Well, Intel 18A is probably three
| years out and by that time we'll have TSMC N2P with backside
| power delivery so who will even care about Intel 18A" are just
| extrapolating history. That's a dangerous game when all these
| rankings and valuations are based on asymptotically approaching
| the limits of the laws of physics. And while it is unlikely that
| Intel will take the lead again, TSMC showing any sign of
| faltering will raise the relative value of the #2 companies.
|
| Intel is not in a good spot, but they're still an interesting
| business, they're still designing some of the best chips on the
| planet, and with the right decisions could grow to be even better
| than interesting. IMO, this article is missing a lot of the hard
| analysis and data that Stratechery is usually known for; I don't
| feel you can have a researched discussion on Intel without
| talking about fabrication volume or their concerning levels of
| debt, but he didn't mention either of those things. Heck, more
| than one passing mention of China feels kinda important to the
| topic.
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| > remember that TSMC is built entirely on the back of ASML;
|
| Probably a few people east of the Netherlands have noticed and
| are doing something about it.
| astrange wrote:
| That's not the only thing you have to replace. ASML has
| layers of sole suppliers themselves, like Zeiss who make
| their lenses.
|
| EUV itself was developed by US government labs; ASML is a
| sole supplier of it because we licensed it to them and
| refused to give it to Nikon/Canon for no good reason.
| pphysch wrote:
| > The biggest reason is geopolitics: If escalated confrontation
| happens with China
|
| If escalated confrontation happens with China, and that is
| massive IF that is dependent on insanely belligerent action
| from the West like giving nukes to Taiwan, then new
| semiconductor manufacturing will be the least of our worries. A
| Chinese blockade on Chinese and East Asian exports to US would
| result in total economic collapse in USA over a relatively
| short period. $100,000,000,000s in real demand for goods no
| longer being met over the span of weeks.
|
| The possibility of direct conflict with China is the domain of
| armchair strategists that consume too many Reddit headlines,
| Peter Zeihan, Economist, etc., and individuals directly
| downstream of the defense budget, where Threat Inflation is
| good business. It's really not something that serious,
| intelligent people are anticipating on the horizon (again,
| outside of the wildcard of an insane new administration in
| Washington). Even the insane combo of Matt Pottinger, Mike
| Pompeo, John Bolton didn't get close to manifesting it
| (allegedly, some of their attempts were undermined by
| backchannel diplomacy from Gen. Milley and the JSOC). So what's
| the real risk?
| 015a wrote:
| There are a thousand different ways that "escalated
| confrontation" with China can fall short of "direct conflict"
| while still negatively impacting TSMC's ability to allocate
| production to the west. That's why I said "escalated
| confrontation". If the only ways you can think of it
| happening is what Zeihan says, then that's simply a failure
| of your own creativity.
|
| One moderately realistic one: Taiwan experiences something
| similar to what happened in Hong Kong, during a time when US
| leadership is not motivated to aid in its defense. This isn't
| a situation where China and the US are at war; we're still
| trading with China; and broadly speaking the economies of
| both countries are fine. But, Taiwan isn't, and whether it
| surfaces as key TSMC talent/tech leaving the country,
| military action, or just PRC subtly shifting TSMC's
| allocation priorities toward the homeland: western chip
| manufacturers could benefit. This isn't seemingly likely to
| happen in the next four years given the stated priorities of
| both sides of the political isle; but the right is shifting
| more-and-more isolationist every year, and no one arguing in
| good faith would speak with such certainty as you have on
| what happens 2028 and onward.
| mrighele wrote:
| > that is dependent on insanely belligerent action from the
| West like giving nukes to Taiwan
|
| The USA administration has stated several times that they
| would defend Taiwan if China invaded (see for example [1]).
| Would you consider that an "insanely belligerent action from
| the West"?
|
| You can argue that China is not going to invade any time
| soon, but I wouldn't consider the probability negligible.
|
| [1] https://thediplomat.com/2024/06/what-to-make-of-bidens-
| lates...
| cs702 wrote:
| The OP makes a compelling case that Intel's foundry operations
| have fallen so far behind that they are no longer economically
| viable on their own, in the face of current market forces, i.e.,
| Intel's foundry business may not be able to earn a positive
| return on the tens of billions of dollars of capex now required
| to catch up with TSMC.
|
| If the US truly views having a domestic foundry as critical to
| national security, the US federal government has no choice but to
| pay up big time to support Intel's foundry business until --
| hopefully, eventually -- that business is able to compete
| profitably against TSMC to manufacture chips for Apple, Nvidia,
| AMD, etc.
|
| Oh, how the mighty have fallen!
| cogman10 wrote:
| There are a slew of foundries in the US already that aren't
| intel and are open to manufacturing for non-intel products. For
| example, Global Foundries.
|
| I just don't see what benefit at this point the US government
| would see investing in intel when they aren't really a whole
| lot better at the game at this point vs pretty much anyone
| else.
| wmf wrote:
| Intel is a decade ahead of other US foundries.
| kazen44 wrote:
| Also, unlike TSMC, which the taiwainese goverment sees as a
| national asset and which actually garuantees them economic co-
| dependence with the west and thus independance from china,t he
| US seems to have forgotten that having your own manufacturing
| capability is very important for national security.
| jhallenworld wrote:
| The Altera merger pain is maybe enlightening.
|
| Altera 10-series FPGAs were massively delayed due to Intel's 10
| nm fab problems. But I speculate that there was also a big
| difference in toolchains, does anyone know for sure? I mean
| Altera was using TSMC previously, and I presume were using
| industry standard tools: Cadance / Synopsis. But I would guess
| Intel was running their fab on home-grown tools... what is the
| status these days? For example I know for sure that IBM's
| synthesis was "Booledozer".
|
| It's interesting because maybe Intel will spin out the fab
| business. But are they immediately ready to become a commercial
| fab business instead an Intel-only business? What's the toolchain
| like for Intel fab?
| wmf wrote:
| Historically Intel did use non-standard EDA tools which is one
| reason they had trouble getting outside customers onto 10 nm
| (besides the fact that 10 nm didn't work). Some Intel
| acquisitions like Fulcrum and Barefoot never used Intel fabs.
|
| I think they're supporting a more standard toolchain starting
| with 18A.
| jhallenworld wrote:
| I see, this is their newest node or close to it.
|
| https://www.anandtech.com/show/21504/intel-18a-status-
| update...
|
| "For Intel, getting an external PDK out for a leading-edge
| process node is no small feat, as the company has spent
| decades operating its fabs for the benefit of its internal
| product design teams. A useful PDK for external customers -
| and really, a useful fab environment altogether - not only
| needs process nodes that stick to their specifications rather
| than making bespoke adjustments, but it means that Intel
| needs to document and define all of this in a useful,
| industry standard fashion. One of the major failings of
| Intel's previous efforts to get into the contract foundry
| business, besides being half-hearted efforts overall, is that
| they didn't author PDKs that external companies could easily
| use. "
|
| But some bad news today:
|
| https://www.reuters.com/technology/intel-manufacturing-
| busin...
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| meanwhile, Intel's chips (and others) are still being used to
| build Russian bombs killing Ukrainians.
|
| https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/russia-buys-...
| protomolecule wrote:
| President Zelensky can stop it in a day.
| hash872 wrote:
| Not a trade lawyer but as I understand it, WTO treaty obligations
| specifically forbid the kind of purchase guarantees that Ben's
| arguing for here. Part of the whole point of the WTO is to to
| pull up the ladder and prevent countries from doing what Japan,
| South Korea, and Taiwan successfully did to become rich. So this
| kind of support for domestic manufacturers is not allowed
| synergy20 wrote:
| In June 2021, Gelsinger named 22-year Intel vet Sandra Rivera to
| head up a new Datacenter and AI Group. Rivera, who spent two
| years as Intel's chief people officer before taking on her new
| role, describes what Intel staffers are looking to get out of
| their relationship with the company, using terms that would have
| been unlikely to come up in its original heyday. "For sure, we
| are in an age now where our employees are looking for a deeper,
| richer connection to the purpose of the organization," she says.
| "They care about diversity, equity, inclusion. They care about
| the planet."
| umvi wrote:
| > today AMD has both better designs and, thanks to the fact they
| fab their chips at TSMC, better processes
|
| On paper AMD is better, but in the scientific community, it seems
| that Intel has much better performance for things like NumPy and
| SciPy. The reason seems to be "Intel(r) MKL"
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Math_Kernel_Library).
|
| I'm using a lot of weasel words like "seems to" because I haven't
| rigorously proved it. But anecdotally, my company's AI pipelines
| which are NumPy/SciPy heavy run an order of magnitude faster (2
| seconds vs. 20 seconds) on my laptop's Intel i7 than the do on my
| Ryzen 7, despite the Ryzen 7 being a newer gen than the i7.
| benreesman wrote:
| I've heard the theory that Intel is physically incapable of doing
| the lithography transition they need to do without missing at
| least one full release cycle. Which should be bad news but
| shouldn't be existential.
|
| The theory goes that any CEO who does the necessary thing will be
| fired, so either they won't do it, or the board will replace them
| with someone who won't do it.
|
| That kind of market failure can destroy arbitrary value.
| cbanek wrote:
| Sidequest:
|
| "I'm going to do Windows and then I'm going to do Windows Mobile
| and I'm going to do Windows embedded." (all on intel x86)
|
| As someone who worked on Windows Mobile and Windows Embedded,
| it's funny because that's what management was hoping, but it was
| so different. I don't think any of the phones had an x86 chip in
| them, although that was our debugging setup so we could use
| vastly more powerful desktop machines as devkits (although we
| still had devices to). Having to port parts of Windows to ARM and
| even MIPS was a giant PITA.
|
| Windows Embedded is closer since it was based on XP, but also a
| completely different branch from what I remember from Win Mobile.
|
| A lot of people think it's easy to port things, and hard to write
| things. With really, really complicated software, it's still
| really hard just to port things.
| benreesman wrote:
| I generally like Stratechery but this is not up to the usual
| standard.
|
| To the extent that CISC means anything it means "backwards
| compatible". Modern ARM cores have multi-step decode and issue:
| to the extent that RISC means anything it means "we developed
| this with twenty year's hindsight so we don't have to do a lot in
| microcode yet." In die area, in TDP, in wafer consumption, it's
| just not a big cost.
|
| To the extent that Intel missed AI so did everyone: right now
| there's one target and that's NVIDIA, no amount of HBM/TC ratio
| tuning is going to change that. Like 3 of 17 Ray/Anyscale
| tutorials target Habana. The Gaudi stuff works fine if you're
| willing to pay the "last year's model" tax all non-CUDA does.
|
| And bigger picture, on semiconductors it's the geopolitics people
| who are watching the bright line: semiconductors are a major
| power arena, the markets will get adjusted along those lines.
| dzonga wrote:
| yeah intel's foundry business might not be competitive in the
| short term. but it's better than nothing. they can focus on other
| industries that don't need high performance / for low power.
|
| because if you yield the whole thing to tsmc. you won't be able
| to recover the expertise, which is catastrophic for both intel /
| USA.
| ghostpepper wrote:
| Anyone else notice how many typos are in this article? Does no
| one proofread anymore?
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-09-04 23:00 UTC)